There were lots of blogs that were personal diaries back in the early days; but there were always many blogs the weren't. The first "web log", in my opinion, was the page at NCSA, home of the Mosaic browser, that was literally a log of new web servers coming on-line. I used to go there daily to see what was new. (Later I used Yahoo for that purpose; and not much later than that I gave up. :-)

Another big site for early blogging was Dave Winer's "Scripting News", in which he talked about Frontier and Radio Userland, two early web platforms. Winer was also responsible for "EditThisPage", the first web site I ever saw that allowed editing a website on another server through the browser. It was followed by Weblogs.com, which hosted some of the earliest blogs. I had one there, briefly.

And then, of course, there was GeoCities, where you explicitly picked your "city" based on the kinds of things you were going to be writing about. Blogging was always extremely hetergeneous.

What we didn't have in the early days was monetization or, naturally, an intense focus on monetization.